Ummmmm why?

Sorry, thats classified.
And... why not? It's perfectly true.

I could not agree more. Unfortunately, commercial aviation has lent itself to the notion that, with enough time and money, any rating can be obtained by anyone. I'm not for creating some sort of club of elitists, but rather a corps of professionals who have met demanding, uncompromising standards that not everyone can meet. The Air Force has probably washed out thousands of pilots over the years for landing a T-38 10 knots fast or a couple hundred feet long - and God Bless that. There is no do over, no re-test, and no amount of money can get a guy his wings. I would love to see the FAA take a similar approach to standards. Instead of flooding the market with cheap goods, ala Wal-Mart, our government would be wise to see the return of the American pilot as the gold standard of aviation. Our licenses are a joke to the European and Middle Eastern carriers.

It's good to see that someone who would know what they're talking about can add to my comment. I have to point out that my comment is the perception of a time-building chotch that has neither flown 121 nor been in the military. Time will tell if I'm going to be in a position to back that comment up...that is to say, I'm either going to make it to the service as a pilot and put my money where my mouth is or I'm going to continue to step on my lingham on the forums.

I probably missed it somewhere, but whats the point of the MPL? Whats wrong with getting your commercial multi with an instrument rating, then going to training for the type and all that? You still have to learn the same stuff, you still have to know how to handle an engine out situation.

What you're missing is that the MPL does not mean multi-engine license.

It means multi-pilot license...

It is essentially accelerated training in the sense that it trains new pilots from the ground up only in those skills necessary to operate as part of a two-pilot crew. I don't have much exposure to the entirety of the concept, but I am under the impression that the most basic training is abbreviated enough that a MPL pilot graduate is incompetent and legally unable to fly as a rated solo pilot without further training.

It's feared to be one more step toward making the airline pilot profession into true brain-dead bus driving. I believe the consensus around the hangar is that such training programs will produce a pilot who is drastically inferior in skills, experience, and overall safety.

At the very least it will provide corporate management greater justification to slash incentives...to be honest, having gone through the run-of-the mill GA/college training, I couldn't respect that riff raff.

You say you are not for creating an elitist club yet that's what you're implying. Tons of civilian pilots wash out from their flight schools and even more run out of money, something most military aviators never have to worry about (and I'm totally OK with it).

Even more never even get a chance to interview at a major airline or do it decades after their military counterparts. I know that’s a fact of life and I accept it but to claim that soon only military trained pilots will get “real” pilot training is an overkill. You're obviously very pro-military biased on this subject and that’s why you feel that way.


Really? I bet you are against the ab-initio training and the multi-crew license, aren’t you? Yet many pilots in Europe and in the Middle East were part of the ab-initio training, so which license is a joke again?

Our licenses are a joke abroad. Have you ever seen the requirements for an ATP outside the U.S. The book work is daunting compared to ours. It doesn't mean their pilots are better its just that they have gone through a better vetting process than ours is.

BTW, I'm all for creating an elitist society of aviators that are sought after for employment in this country. That means our standard of living, etc., will rise.

The best way to describe it is by taking a look at China’s aviation. Private pilot training and civil aviation is pretty much non-existent over there. Literally, there’s only a handful private airplanes in the country of 1.3 billion people. That’s very unlikely to change anytime soon.

Yet, their airlines are growing very fast and their military does not have enough retiring pilots to fulfill the needs of the passenger and the cargo airlines.

Multi crew pilot license is a way to by-pass single engine flight training as such flying barely exists there anyways. So basically they go straight from private pilot training to highly advanced airplanes. Their training is actually much longer in those types of airplanes than in let’s say the US but of course they have very little single engine experience.

Also, once they start “flying” for their respective airlines they spend literally years in the “jumpseat” working the radios and learning by observing the captain and the copilot. Several years of this 'observing experience' combined with hundreds of additional hours in simulators will finally get them advanced to the copilot seat. It is a ‘quicker’ way to train their pilots but it’s hardly cheaper for the airlines.

I’m not defending either system just stating that their only options were basically to keep hiring foreign pilots or to speed up the training of their ‘native’ pilots by using the multi crew license.

After all, very few countries in the world have as many civilian trained pilots as the US does.

Someone told me that on one foreign practical they still test for knowledge of celestial nav...not sure if that's true but the rumor alone makes the point.